First of all, Qt has shown that it has a lot of interesting application and a lot of Qt apps has been ported to the OS/2 platform, that is why I think it is very important to have Qt 5.5 ported too. Bitwise has also demonstrated that they can deliver what they offer and have OS/2 skilled developers. I think we all need to help and donate to this fund raising started by OS2VOICE.

The other thing interesting about the OS2VOICE post is what it says "But having Q.T. will also make it easier to port the Chromium web browser to OS/2. " The important browsers on the wild are Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. Dumping Firefox for smaller and experimental browser will not be nice, but dumping Firefox for Chromium makes a lot more sense. If having Qt 5.5 will help the developers to have Chromium ported there is another reason why we need to support a Qt port.

What I think it needs more information is why it is so hard to port RUST to OS/2 and why "It is unlikely that RUST will ever be ported to OS/2." If someone can post more information about this subject, it will be great.

In my opinion chrome browser should be taken behind the barn and shot. It does not have the ability to use essential addons like noscript and adblock+. After all it is a google invention and google lives by adds on web pages.

Maybe they should look at waterfox which is associated with firefox but has had all of the slurping and tracking bits removed. It was forked by a 16 year old a few years ago. I have been moving my friends that insist on using windows over to it and they are all more than happy with it - I even have a friend with iOS using it rather than safari. It also works well on linux.

As far as I know, having a newer QT won't help with porting Chromium (the open source part of Chrome) to OS/2 porting Chromium would be a huge job.Palemoon is a possibility as it is a fork of Mozilla. I have a very broken port here that does display web pages.Rust is basically alpha software, or was until recently. It is built on LLVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM, so first LLVM would have to be ported. LLVM is a project of similar size as GCC and to get it to the point where it produces code, including DLLs on OS/2 by itself would be an undertaking.Then Rust 0.01 needs to be ported, which is used to port Rust 0.02, which is used to port Rust 0.03, etc, repeat about 20 times to get to Rust 1.0, which might be able to build current Rust. Every 6 weeks there's a new release and Mozilla uses the latest.It's a lot of work, which would involve at least one compiler expert, which we don't have. Even some of the BSDs have only lately got current Rust running, and they're starting with LLVM already ported and using ELF objects, shared libraries and executables, unlike us. We don't have a compiler expert and the funding for one would possibly be a couple of hundred thousand dollars or more.

@Ivan, I looked at WaterFox, seems it is purely 64bit and would be harder to port then Palemoon.Eventually we're going to be left behind as everyone moves to 64bit. Developers with tons of memory will forget about 32bit, programs such as web browsers will need more memory then 32bit can supply (already happening with Mozilla, most problems are memory related, even on 32bit Windows) and most users will be on 64bit and 32 bit operating systems will have the same fate as 16 bit operating systems.It'll take a while but the switch over is happening more and more. Most all x86 CPU's have been capable of 64bit for over a decade, memory is cheap enough that having 4-8GBs is common, hard drive prices the same, so the slight bloat of 64bit doesn't matter at all.

First of all, Qt has shown that it has a lot of interesting application and a lot of Qt apps has been ported to the OS/2 platform, that is why I think it is very important to have Qt 5.5 ported too. Bitwise has also demonstrated that they can deliver what they offer and have OS/2 skilled developers. I think we all need to help and donate to this fund raising started by OS2VOICE.

The other thing interesting about the OS2VOICE post is what it says "But having Q.T. will also make it easier to port the Chromium web browser to OS/2. " The important browsers on the wild are Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. Dumping Firefox for smaller and experimental browser will not be nice, but dumping Firefox for Chromium makes a lot more sense. If having Qt 5.5 will help the developers to have Chromium ported there is another reason why we need to support a Qt port.

What I think it needs more information is why it is so hard to port RUST to OS/2 and why "It is unlikely that RUST will ever be ported to OS/2." If someone can post more information about this subject, it will be great.

Regards

That last part about RUST I understood that from Dmitry from Bitwise Works. He did not explain any details. But I will take his word for it :-) Also next to RUST do not forget the other point I mentioned in the article I have written.Even if RUST could be ported to OS/2 we would still be stuck with the other issue that Firefox is already bloatware and according to Dmitry (and developer on other platforms), so hard to maintain.

At least we are starting on this journey early enough to have a new browser on time.

During the OS/2 User Meeting last Weekend we had the Chance to discuss this Topic as well.

I will post my 2 Cents about this here based on the informations we have been presented there and from what I have read/heard elsewhere so far:

- The Project title is somewhat misleading in my opinion: it should be named as: "Sponsorship for a QT5 port needed"

- There is no clear Roadmap regarding a browser: wich will be the one of choice?

- Therefore it is not clear: what is needed at all to complete such a Task? QT5, Rust? Else?

- The Project Goal is 10.000 Dollar where Roderick stated that already 6.500 have been collected, as some "unknown" or "do not want to be named Person" already donated 5.000 Dollar in Bitcoins in Addition. Roderick said that this Money would be enough to work for 3 or 4 months on the QT port. But he estimated the QT port itself would take at least 6 to 9 month to work on...

And for some Browser Alternatives there is even no Need to have QT5 ported.

So this Project is more or less a shot in the dark so far. It is not clear where it leads to nor when it will be completed. Roderick stated that it is better to have a movement than None.

I appriciate all the Things done by Roderick and BWW and all others involved, but not having a plan at all - other than porting QT5 first and looking where this will lead to - is not a good way in my opinion.

I think it would be a good idea to

- make the decision first where to invest the Money in- give more Information about this at all- so: to Show a plan.

The rust port seems to be the least likely to occur, because of:1. Getting RUST on OS/2 seems to be a lot of work. 2. As Sandra confirmed Firefox is big construction pit that is never ending. These two items make it the least likely candidate.

Going with Pale Moan (a Mozilla split off at browser 24) is very likely to have the issue in the near future that Pale Moan could port code from the Mozilla foundation. And then we are stuck back to square one.

Having a QT browser we depend on QT and webkit. We have multiple browsers that depend on QT and webkit. Having multiple options.

Going with Pale Moan (a Mozilla split off at browser 24) is very likely to have the issue in the near future that Pale Moan could port code from the Mozilla foundation. And then we are stuck back to square one.

And that's not the only problem. It also lacks the support for native text encodings. Without an useable C++ development environment there's no hope for something more modern or advanced. Why should an incomplete and slow port of the Qt framework change the situation? On the other hand it's possible to use something written in C that will perform much better under OS/2-based systems. Maybe like the NetSurf (http://www.netsurf-browser.org/) for RISC OS.